


it will rain

by patriciaselina



Series: The Parallelism Project [3]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers, Tiger & Bunny
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 05:06:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patriciaselina/pseuds/patriciaselina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>T&B+Hetalia crossover, part of the Parallelism Project. When two broken men who tell the world they're not broken tell each other they're broken, what is the result? Apparently, Keith and Alfred say that such a situation leads to an awesome friendship and a whole lot of spoiled burgers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it will rain

A pair of men literally bump into each other in the park one day. With the blond hair and blue eyes they both share, one could easily mistake them for twins.

The one with windswept hair and no glasses speaks up first. “Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t see you there – again, I’m sorry.”

“Nahh, it’s cool man, no harm done.” The other man, with oval glasses and a cowlick sticking out of his head, gives his pseudo-doppelgänger a big toothy grin. “So don’t worry about it.”

“It seems like I have not seen you here before! Hello, sir. My name is Keith, Keith Goodman.” Keith has always been polite. With his free hand, the man without glasses – Keith – offers his hand for the other man to shake.

“And I’m Am – Alfred F. Jones, awesomest human being to ever walk the earth.” The other man shakes the offered hand.

Normally, the conversation would stop there, but Keith notices something else. “You’ve got a dog too? My John’s a Labrador – and yours is a Labrador as well?” He stoops down to the level of his precious John to better scrutinize the other golden Labrador in front of him. “May I know his name?”

“Labrador.” Alfred says without any trace of irony or embarrassment – okay, so maybe there was some irony in that tone. “He’s not mine, by the way. I’m sure that had poor Labby been mine, his name would have been more unique and awesome. Like me.”

“Hmm,” Keith says, tugging on John’s leash thoughtfully. John’s eyes are round and inquisitive, and he barks a single note while sniffing at the air around the other dog. The other dog sniffs and barks back, tongue wagging.

Bonds of friendship initiated! Keith thinks, face brightening up with a goofy smile. He was the one who trained John; of course he’d turn out to be a very friendly dog indeed. “Your Lab seems to like John!”

“And your John seems like an ace guy. Hey, mind if I and Labby walk with you? We’re not exactly familiar with Sternbild, and I don’t know the best spots to go dog-walking…”

“Then you, sir, are in luck!” Keith smiles, thinking that after flying around Sternbild every night for years, it’s only natural that he knows this city inside and out like no one else does, and Alfred would appreciate that very much.

The path Keith chooses to bring Alfred to crosses a hamburger stand, and for this Alfred says something about how Keith is the ‘awesomest being this side of Sternbild’, which makes the other blond smile.

(Since Barnaby became King of Heroes, not many people are calling Sky High that anymore.)

“I’ll have a cheeseburger set, please; again, that’s a cheeseburger set, please!” Keith says, and is pleasantly surprised when the lady at the counter comes back with two sets. Of course he was hungry enough to eat two, but how did the lady know that when he was only asking for one?”

“Miss, I’ll be having one large coke, large fries, and fifteen cheeseburgers!”

Keith almost drops his bags in surprise. “Really, Alfred? Fifteen?”

“Oh, miss, did I say fifteen?” The lady on the other side of the counter nods, visibly still in shock like Keith and the other people in line. “Scratch that, I mean fifty.”

The people manning the stall scurry to procure Alfred’s fifty, and Keith chews on his first cheeseburger. This is going to take quite a while…

===

They continue their walk after that, plastic bags looped around their right arms, burgers in their right hands, leashes around their left wrists and drinks in their left hands. If they looked the same then, they definitely looked like twins now.

Keith knows where this path would bring them, but seeing the fountain he’s become so used to still makes his heart ache. Alfred flops on one side of the bench, ginormous bag of hamburgers next to him and Labrador; Keith mentally says sorry to Miss Cis. Instead of flowers, all he has to offer her memory is this man who looks so much like him and fifty hamburgers.

Despite already being on his fifth cheeseburger, Alfred recognizes the look his companion is throwing the fountain behind their bench. Regret and longing – two things he has seen before, on his own face.

“Dude, you okay there?” Alfred asks, almost conversationally despite the worry in his mind. “You look awfully quiet.”

“Oh, nothing. This place just reminds me of someone.” Keith’s tone is awfully quiet, and Alfred is now pretty sure that he was right and Keith is pining over a lost love.

“Believe me when I say I know the feeling. It’s not the best one to have.” Alfred says, thoughtfully chewing on his burger to stop his voice from shaking. “Why is it that the awesomest guys – namely, us – always don’t get the girl? Not that it makes us any less awesome.” He faces Keith, who is chewing on his second burger and looks like he is in pain. “Talking about it would also not make you any less awesome, dude.”

Keith’s never opened up about this before, not to the Heroes he considers his friends, not to John who he thinks is his soulmate, not even to himself save the few occasions he wakes up from dreams with tears in his eyes. Dreams about the girl in the park interspersed with images of androids and rose petals. Too many rose petals.

“Her name was –  _is_  – Cis.” Keith says, one hand setting his drink on the bench so he can hold a striped carnation with the other. The flower is flat and wilted, probably pressed in his jacket pocket. “And I think I may be in love with her.”

There. He said it, the word was already out in the open for all to see.  _Love._ Somehow Keith feels as if everyone else is listening, as if is soul is suddenly on display for everyone in Sternbild to see.  _Look, everyone. This is Keith Goodman. This is Sky High. He is a former King of Heroes who got his helmet stuck in a wall and is in love with a woman he will never meet again. Pitiful, right?_

“From the look on your face, you’ve fallen hard, man.” Alfred says, watching him calmly from behind his lenses.

“I don’t think she will ever feel the same way.” Keith’s eyes are locked on the pressed flower in his hands, hamburgers forgotten. “I haven’t seen her in…” Days. Weeks. Months. A year, maybe. He doesn’t know when he started counting.

“Talk about relationships-in-absentia,” Alfred says with a small whistle, but he is not mocking his companion in any way. Like he said, he did know the feeling. “I used to feel the same way for someone once. Her name was awfully long and Spanish and hard to remember, but I called her Maria. I thought she was pretty. She thought I saved her life. Not the best way to start a relationship, but…ahh, we were kind of forced into it, at the time.”

Unlike Keith, who had clammed up as soon as he said what needed to be said, Alfred rambled on and on. “The funny thing about it – or maybe it wasn’t funny, it was more of ironic – was that I only realized that I was in love with her when she was no longer forced to love me anymore. Right now, she’s with a stuffy English guy I know whose eyebrows are three sizes too large who she loves. Actually loves.” Alfred’s heart tightens and it hurts. He knows the feeling, indeed. “They say that knowing is half the battle, but sometimes I think that it’s better that I never knew what she felt about me; that’s better than knowing she did love me before and it’s over now.”

Maybe there are a few minutes that pass after those words are spoken in which Keith doubts that Alfred is right, in which Alfred doubts that what he felt was really love and not just overdue longing. But those minutes pass, and both of them are so lost in their thoughts that they don’t recognize the raindrops evolving into a full-fledged storm before it is too late.

Alfred shouts out a curse word like a exclamatory sentence, and the life is back in his blue eyes again, bad memories pushed back into the bottom of his heart and covered up so well that it doesn’t seem like he ever remembered them before. Keith could only wish he was that quick at recovering. “Dude, looks like that’s the end of our hamburgers.”

True enough – the hamburgers are drenched and so are the fries, and the drinks seem to be the only ones safe in their plastic containers. John and Labrador are drenched, and so are their human companions, and despite the brevity of the situation and the seriousness of their prior conversation Keith and Alfred could do nothing but laugh.

“Come on, dude,” Alfred says after getting over his laughter, grabbing Keith by the hand and shocking him. “There’s a pasta place around the corner that one of my friends co-owns. Romano’d probably pissed at seeing me, but Feli won’t mind if we go over there to get dried up.” His smile was so contagious; Keith can’t help but smile back. “And I don’t think he’d mind giving us some coffee, either.”

Hand in hand, dogs trailing behind them, the two men set off for the mysterious pasta place, bad memories temporarily forgotten and left on the park bench along with the rest of the drenched hamburgers.

The ghosts will come back, the girls interspersed in their memories with androids stained blood-red and the Filipino-American War. But for now, they have their dogs, each other, and the promise of Italian hot chocolate in their immediate future, and for now, that was quite enough.

“Keith, my man, this is gonna be the start of an awesome friendship!”

=

 _fin._

**Author's Note:**

> So, I’ve been talking with Ate Sisi (die-forelle@Tumblr) after getting the Kotetsu+Japan one done, and I’ve been thinking of making these T&B+Hetalia crossovers into some sort of series. Wish me luck, hmm, guys? The current working title is The Parallelism Project, culled from one of my ENGL 1 lessons, but it’s still subject to change if I ever think of a better title.
> 
> Since this is in Trishy-verse, 'Ria's with Iggy. I can't help it, it's my OTP. orz The person Al was supposed to refer to was Belarus (because of the pale hair and unemotional eyes she shares with Cis), but the speech about 'Ria kind of wrote itself on its own. I'm sorry. ;w; Also, Lab comes from ctcsherry's Canadian provinces, btw. I love these two blonds, and I will seriously make them another fic if I could. >_>
> 
> Next one on my list is either Pao+Mei, or Bunny+Iggy. If Lady Luck smiles down on me, I’ll be able to do either fics this long, or drabblets for each and every one of the Heroes and Agnes. Maybe I’d get to do one with everyone, too. So, again, I need to activate my good luck mode. >_
> 
> The title is obviously from a Bruno Mars song which I chose for the pure angst-iness of the lyrics. So, well. That’s all for now, dears. \o/


End file.
